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Game Testing

So, as you know if you watch things here, I’m a big MMO fan, and recently it’s Final Fantasy XIV. I just remembered that I had purchased a BluRay a while ago of Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, and wondered if I could play that. Not an MMO, but just a single player RPG. So I looked it up.

I tried to install the demo. Figured I’d check it out. I had three choices to get it:

Steam

Microsoft Store

Origins [whatever that is, but the site looks like a steam wanabee.]

First I tried the Microsoft Store. – FAIL. I tried to sign in with my Microsoft account to do that, but I got dumped to a page that said it failed. No real help there.

Try steam. No problem, at first. Program downloaded and installed. Then hung after a few clicks to set it up.

Just hung there forever like it was trying to reach some website. Although why would it by saving stuff online? It’s a single player RPG.

Well it’s certainly not ugly. But these folks have not been paying attention. While the game looks great, the developers are stuck in a game design from years ago.

What’s wrong out of the box? I know that the modern way to review games with with a Youtube video where I shout at the screen while I deal with the frustrations of the game. But here is the old style blogging review. Here are my first impressions after a couple of hours with Revelation Online Open Beta.

I recently became aware of a method of fighting in dungeons that seemed quite surprising. Apparently some folks equip Slayer crystals in dungeons in an effort to up their Crit stat. These crystals only increase crit however, when your HP is below 50%. This causes some very strange behavior :

Healers are discouraged from healing players since they over heal – above 50%.

HP Pots are using during combat to manage HP to the correct level so that the Slayer crystals have their effect.

This causes an Economy in Pots apparently, where some folks make Gold based on the creation and sale of Pots.

I decided to do a test to see if Slayer Crystals had more benefit than the obvious other choice of Pounding Crystals which have recently been added to the game. I’ve done this test and recorded the video. The video and a PDF file of the data analysis spreadsheet are available for your review.

Bottom Line: Slayer Crystals, under the conditions of this test, appear to be about 20% better than Pounding Crystals. But the difficulty of keeping your health below 50%, and the issue of not being able to use healers, would seem to outweigh this advantage.

This is an enhanced version of a tutorial game provided with Stencylworks. The enhancements are to add a scene with more balloons and to add a 5 second frame rate measurement.

The desktop shows 60 fps. I see my Android Asus Transformer getting 30 FPS, which is apparently the setting for Flash on this platform. Go Nvidia Tegra 2 ! Looks like Stencylworks is just fine to make games for Android.. What are we waiting for?